Karbon is a Graphical Profiler based on trace files produced by strace or systemtap. It has a modular design, allowing individual analysis plug-ins to be registered and used at any time.

Karbon is perfect for identifying performance issues related to System Calls ONLY. It is completely blind regarding the application code. It can not resolve symbols, nor detect software-induced performance penalties.

This means that after identifying the 'hot' system calls you will still need to go through your code and identify were the problem is located.

Karbon works with most of trace file formats, however it's most optimal to create them with the following command line:

strace -TtttfFvx -s 256 -o trace.dmp -- /path/to/application args ...

If you prefer, you can live-trace the application through the Karbon GUI.

You will need Java Runtime installed to your system. In most of the cases you will only need to double-click the .jar, but if you have trouble, try running it from the command-line:

java -jar Karbon.jar

The following list enumerates all the currently available plug-ins and their use:

• Classifier : Traces all system calls that perform operations on file descriptors, such as Filesystem (fopen,fclose etc.), Memory (mmap, mprotect etc.), Network (socket,sockopt ...) or Misc (pipe, socketpair etc.).
• System Calls : An overview plug-in that summarises the statistics from all system calls, such as error rate, time spent on errors and overall time spent.
• Socket Tracker : A specialised plug-in that tracks socket creation and actions. This plugin also resolves the endpoint details (IP address or UNIX socket) and the traffic through them.
• File Tracker : A specialised plug-in that tracks individual files accessed by the application, including detailed I/O statistics.
• Hotspot Tracker : A specialised plug-in that identifies operations that take too much time to complete, including System Calls, Filesystem Operations and Processes.
• Process Tracker : A specialised plug-in that tracks process creation and behaviour. It constructs a comprehensive process tree and evolution graph in order to identify fork-related problems.
• Time Utilisation : A specialised plug-in that summarises the time spent in various operations, such as File I/O or Network I/O.

Karbon - Tracefile Analyzer GUI Copyright (C) 2010-2015 Ioannis Charalampidis

This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program. If not, see http://www.gnu.org/licenses/.